Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 348 posts

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#331

Post by stormbrew »

dijit wrote: post #223
native_samples wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't inherit any of what he has today, did he? And he didn't come from wealth. He grew up in South Africa.

Are you implying that there are no wealthy people in South Africa? Not to sound “attacky” but that seems extremely naive. Truthfully, he comes from wealth, but not close to the wealth he has today; his father owned half of an emerald mine for example. He is quoted as saying (about his youth): "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe"

No one on the planet at the time was as wealthy as the current crop of ultra-rich, including Musk. Perhaps no one in all of history, really, though that becomes a complicated comparison really fast.

But yes, he absolutely comes from wealth. Just like most of them do.

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#332

Post by dragonwriter »

mixedCase wrote: post #330
brnt wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, libertarianism is entirely constructed by what you can call alt-right circles. See Jane Mayer's Dark Money.

Libertarianism is literally just liberalism before modern day US liberals coopted the name, hence the alternative label "classical liberal". In the rest of the world being a "liberal" still means the same thing. Feel free to summarize the point if there's any.

> Libertarianism is literally just liberalism before modern day US liberals coopted the name

Once liberalism stopped being purely oppositional and established some power, there became a division between people for whom the progress achieved to date was the end goal and the people who saw it as partial.

In places where the success of liberalism also ushered in pluralism (not the US), the latter group got different names depending on exactly what they saw the end goal as...

In the US, once the early progress of liberalism was the right edge of the Overton Window, use of “liberal” and “conservative” as evolving relative-to-center terms for the directions on the primary axis of political dispute became fairly common, though even that fell apart as a consistent thing when part of the local “liberal” coalition turned sharply right with neoliberalism, resulting in an evolving use of differentiating language within the former “liberal” umbrella.

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#333

Post by hef19898 »

EricE wrote: post #322
hef19898 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota pioneered hybrid vehicles, Boeing got us the first composite fuselage for commercial airliners. I call that innovation. VW is pushing heavily towards EVs, and those actually are in the price range Tesla fails to achieve for its Model 3. It is a different kind of innovation so, only considering "disruptuon" as innovation is quite short sighted so. Espiecially since Christensen himself differentiates between dis…

Is Boeing in space with SpaceX? Would VW even care about EVs without Tesla? Would they lie about them like they did their diesel emissions? lol - holding up VW as something to emulate! GM had a pretty good EV in the 80’s - then killed it. Literally - never sold them, only leased them and forced owners to cough them back up and destroyed them. I have zero interest in owning a Tesla - their stance on right to repair an…

SpaceX isn't the only company shooting stuff into orbit. And VW isn't the only manufacturer pushing into EVss. I used those two because the were braught by OP.

And VW and others would care about EVs because of the general awareness about climate change.

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#334

Post by barnabee »

EricE wrote: post #321
madeofpalk wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can just turn off 'algorithmic timeline' and get a chronological timeline of tweets from people you follow. I would love to pay for no ads on twitter dot com.

You can get that today if you use a third party client. That people use the native twitter interface still boggles my mind.

Agreed, but I'd still pay for Twitter _and_ Tweetbot (without which I'd probably have left the platform years ago)

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#335

Post by toomim »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #218
shafyy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his latest TED interview [0], Musk said that he had the funding secured for that Tesla private offering. He said that he needed to settle with the SEC so that they wouldn't freeze Tesla's bank accounts, and as part of the settlement he needed to publicly say that he hadn't secured funding. I don't think he's lying. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM

That sounds super dubious, the SEC forced him to publicly lie in a settlement? Sorry, I am not buying it. You would have to put at least a dozen SEC lawyers on suicide watch after such a deal. And not only did they force him to lie in a settlement, now he suddenly breaks what he agreed to in that settlement without any consequences, so what was that settlement worth to begin with.

No, the banks forced him to settle. It wasn't the SEC. Watch the video.

The banks didn't want a liability. The SEC disagreement was going to take too much time to resolve legitimately. If he didn't please the banks they wouldn't give him funding.

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#336

Post by SpikeDad »

playpause wrote: post #43
SpikeDad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accomplished? He's got money and hired some smart people. And tech media is more than happy to ignore all the stupid shit he's done and tried.

He’s the chief engineer and product designer at Tesla, and the chief engineer at SpaceX, as well as CEO of both. He led the design and engineering of rockets that land, cutting the cost of space travel by one order of magnitude. Meanwhile he created the most valuable car maker in the world and forced the rest of the industry to bring forward their electric car plans by a decade. And these things weren’t accidents, he…

He owns the companies. He can call himself whatever he wants - doesn't make it true. He got lucky with Tesla - good timing, a pliant customer base willing to ignore all the things Tesla got wrong but still was willing to spend untold amount of money.

I am entirely skeptical he designed anything and considering the duds he's pretending are revolutionary (Boring, Hyperloop, Mars nonsense, Cybertruck, etc) but instead are failures it seems unlikely he could be so right about one thing and so wrong on others.

Trump is rich also

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#338

Post by hnbad »

andruby wrote: post #307
hnbad wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He did code on Zip2 and sold that startup successfully. Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment. > Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want. So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.

I'm not really trying to make a strong case. I'm just a little disappointed when people say "He has not built anything". Isn't that a little mean, and elitist? No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong. If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the m…

I'm not sure "elitist" is the right word for criticizing the wealthiest man on Earth's habit of portraying himself as a genius rocket surgeon.

I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies.

When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all.

Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#339

Post by raspberry1337 »

hef19898 wrote: post #197
raspberry1337 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now. You ignored the essential part of his well written and detailed explanation - its not about the fact that its underground, but the cost of creating underground pathways, for cars or whatever. It saddens me that bad posts like yours infect HN.

It saddens me tgat at HN people start to blindly believe certain people's claims without checking precendce. In Musks case based on, IMHO, pure hype and his celebrity status. So I guess, same?

> In Musks case based on, IMHO, pure hype and his celebrity status

Or his proven track record of creating groundbreaking companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, which has made him the worlds richest man and why we are talking about him right now? Jeez

Re: Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal

#340

Post by paganel »

dc-programmer wrote: post #290
paganel wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is a strategic asset for the US and for the West more generally speaking, even more so than SpaceX at this point, I personally don’t think it will be allowed to tank/go under. I do agree that the stock is way over-valued when looking only at the economic fundamentals, but when one balances out the “the Chinese have all this battery thing all figured out!” vs “we only have Tesla on our side!” then things are dif…

There are definitely influential people who believe social media platforms are also strategic assets. The DOJ did try to expropriate US TikTok that one time

WhatsApp’s acquisition was (partly) intermediated by a boutique investment bank which had former CIA-director George Tenet on its board of directors (or something like that). I’m surprised the strategic aspect of a major part of US’s tech industry is not given much thought in here.
Post reply on HN